Amazon CDN Cost: CloudFront Pricing, Examples, and Alternatives

An estimate that multiplies traffic by one CloudFront rate can miss half the bill. Your viewers may be spread across several pricing regions, small objects can make request charges material, and features such as Origin Shield or Lambda@Edge add their own meters. The Amazon CDN cost also changes depending on whether a distribution uses pay-as-you-go or one of AWS's newer flat-rate plans.

Amazon CloudFront costs either a fixed monthly plan price or a pay-as-you-go total built from data transfer, requests, and optional features. On pay-as-you-go in the United States, Mexico, and Canada, the first 1 TB and 10 million HTTP/HTTPS requests each month are free; the next 9 TB costs $0.085/GB, and HTTPS requests after the allowance cost $0.01 per 10,000. Every one of those numbers is scoped — by region, by request type, by distribution, or by plan allowance — which is why a CloudFront estimate takes a spreadsheet and a flat per-GB rate does not.

Those figures answer the quick question, but they do not produce a procurement-grade forecast. This guide builds the full model, tests it with worked examples, and compares the pricing structures you will encounter when evaluating other CDNs. Prices are public USD list prices checked on July 23, 2026; contracts, credits, taxes, binary-versus-decimal units, and later rate changes can alter an invoice.

Amazon CDN cost at a glance

Amazon CloudFront now has three buying paths. Pick the path before opening a spreadsheet, because the same workload can have a very different bill—and a different feature envelope—under each model.

AWS's CloudFront pay-as-you-go page lists the free allowance, regional transfer tiers, request rates, edge-compute charges, and optional-feature rates. The current flat-rate plan page lists Free, Pro, Business, and Premium at $0, $15, $200, and $1,000 per month for one distribution, with higher configurable Premium allowances available.

Do not compare only the cheapest headline. Pay-as-you-go exposes all CloudFront features and lets cost follow use. Flat-rate plans bundle CloudFront with AWS WAF, DDoS protection, Route 53 DNS, CloudWatch Logs ingestion, TLS, serverless edge compute, and S3 storage credits, but the plan tier determines the included feature set.

How Amazon CloudFront pricing works

For pay-as-you-go, the practical formula is:

monthly CloudFront cost = data transfer out + request charges + optional features + origin costs − allowances − discounts

Each term needs its own inputs. A blended “CDN cost per GB” becomes useful only after the total has been calculated.

Data transfer out to viewers

CloudFront charges for bytes delivered from edge locations to internet viewers. Rates are tiered by monthly volume and calculated separately for geographic groups. The edge location serving the traffic—not the AWS Region containing your origin—determines the viewer-delivery rate.

Current first paid tiers from the official rate card are:

The tier continues downward as regional volume rises. US/Europe delivery reaches $0.060/GB for the next 100 TB, $0.040 for the next 350 TB, and eventually $0.020 above 5 PB. These are marginal tiers, not a retroactive discount: crossing 50 TB does not reprice the first paid 49 TB at the next rate.

CloudFront's Price Classes can exclude some higher-cost edge regions. That can lower the bill, but AWS warns that viewers outside the selected class may experience higher latency because content can be served from a more distant included location. A cost model should therefore pair regional dollars with latency and playback measurements, not assume a smaller price class is a free saving.

HTTP and HTTPS request charges

Requests are billed separately from bytes. After the 10-million-request monthly allowance, North American HTTP requests cost $0.0075 per 10,000 and HTTPS requests cost $0.0100 per 10,000. HTTPS rises to $0.0220 per 10,000 in South America, while several other geographic groups are $0.0120 or $0.0125.

Object size determines whether this line matters. A software-download workload may move many terabytes through relatively few requests. An API, manifest-heavy stream, or image service can generate hundreds of millions of requests while moving modest bandwidth. Track both totals instead of estimating requests from traffic with one company-wide average object size.

Origin transfer and origin work

AWS does not add a data-transfer charge when CloudFront fetches cacheable content from an AWS origin such as S3, EC2, or an Elastic Load Balancer. The origin service can still charge for storage, compute, reads, retrieval, transformation, or other operations. CloudFront also lists separate regional rates for data transferred from CloudFront back to an origin, including viewer-to-origin traffic associated with methods such as POST and PUT.

For a non-AWS origin, include the provider's internet egress and request charges on cache misses. The same is true in a multi-CDN design: AWS says non-origin-fetch traffic from AWS services to CloudFront incurs the source service's regional transfer-out rates. “Origin transfer is free” is therefore a conditional rule, not a universal one.

Optional feature charges

The long tail of CloudFront cost includes several independently metered features:

• Origin Shield requests are billed per 10,000 at the rate for the selected Shield Region; US pricing is $0.0075 per 10,000.
• CloudFront Functions cost $0.10 per million invocations after the included allowance, while Lambda@Edge adds request and duration charges.
• The first 1,000 invalidation paths or cache tags per month are free; additional paths cost $0.005 each. A wildcard path counts as one path, as the invalidation billing guide explains.
• Real-time logs cost $0.01 per million log lines, before any destination-specific processing or storage cost.
• Field-level encryption costs $0.02 per 10,000 eligible requests in addition to the standard HTTPS request price.
• Anycast Static IPs cost $3,000 per list per month, and Dedicated IP custom SSL costs $600 per certificate per month.

Some items will be zero for most distributions. The point is to list enabled features explicitly so that a pricing calculator does not silently omit them.

Amazon CDN cost under flat-rate plans

AWS launched CloudFront flat-rate plans in November 2025 and expanded their capabilities in March 2026. That makes many older Amazon CDN cost guides structurally incomplete.

Premium can be configured above its default allowance. The CloudFront plan documentation currently lists steps up to 600 TB and 6 billion requests for $10,000 per month, with custom pricing beyond that baseline.

No overages does not mean no operating envelope

AWS says flat-rate plans do not charge overages, including during traffic spikes or attacks. Blocked DDoS traffic and requests blocked by AWS WAF do not count toward allowances. A first spike up to three times the monthly allowance does not affect service in that month.

The allowance is still meaningful. AWS evaluates substantial sustained excess over multiple months and may adjust delivery by using fewer or more distant edge locations or changing performance. The console sends notifications at 50%, 80%, and 100%, and recent usage can affect eligibility to subscribe to or downgrade to a given tier.

Treat each allowance as a capacity-planning input, not free unlimited transfer. Confirm that the tier supports the behaviors, domains, configurations, and AWS features your distribution uses. Price one plan per distribution and apex domain in the proposed architecture rather than applying one $15 line across an account with many independent properties.

Flat-rate versus pay-as-you-go is a workload decision

Compared against the pay-as-you-go rate card, a flat-rate plan's headline price looks very low for raw delivery, especially when its bundled WAF, DNS, logging, and S3 credits replace separate AWS charges. Read that number with its scope attached, because the scope is where media workloads break the model:

• One plan covers one distribution. A platform with separate distributions for video, images, downloads, and the marketing site prices a plan for each, not one $15 line for the account.
• The allowance is a ceiling on the plan's design point, not a bandwidth grant. AWS can respond to substantial sustained excess by serving from fewer or more distant edge locations — a performance lever, applied to exactly the delivery-heavy workload that needed the capacity.
• Growth changes eligibility. Recent usage affects whether you can subscribe to or downgrade to a tier, so a plan that fits this quarter is not guaranteed to fit after a launch.
• Unsupported features are a migration, not a line item. Confirm the tier supports the behaviors, domains, and configurations the distribution already depends on.

Pay-as-you-go remains useful when you need its complete feature set or want costs to track irregular use without a fixed configuration envelope. The Savings Bundle sits between the models: AWS currently offers up to 30% savings on CloudFront usage in exchange for a one-year monthly commitment and includes a WAF credit worth up to 10% of the committed amount.

The pattern across all three buying paths is the same: the price is cheap where AWS has scoped it and expensive where you cross the scope. That is a fair trade for an application that lives inside one distribution and grows predictably, and a poor one for global media traffic that grows in bursts.

Amazon CDN cost examples

These examples use decimal units—1 TB equals 1,000 GB—and US/Mexico/Canada pay-as-you-go list pricing. They exclude taxes, negotiated discounts, origin-service charges, and features unless stated. AWS bills from measured usage, so use the unit convention and regional allocation from your own report for reconciliation.

Example 1: 5 TB and 20 million HTTPS requests

Assume 5,000 GB of viewer delivery and 20 million HTTPS requests in a month.

• Transfer: (5,000 GB − 1,000 GB free) × $0.085 = $340.
• Requests: (20M − 10M free) ÷ 10,000 × $0.01 = $10.
• Estimated pay-as-you-go total: $350 per month.

This small workload is not necessarily a $350 decision. Compare the applicable flat-rate plan, included security services, and technical fit; if the distribution qualifies, a fixed price can replace both the transfer and request calculation. Price the same 5 TB against a flat per-GB provider too — at $0.0049/GB it is a $24.50 delivery line with no plan, allowance, or eligibility attached — so you can see how much of the CloudFront figure is delivery and how much is the bundle.

Example 2: 50 TB and 100 million HTTPS requests

At 50,000 GB, the first 1,000 GB is free, the next 9,000 GB uses the $0.085 tier, and the remaining 40,000 GB uses $0.080:

• Transfer: (9,000 × $0.085) + (40,000 × $0.080) = $3,965.
• Requests: (100M − 10M) ÷ 10,000 × $0.01 = $90.
• Estimated pay-as-you-go total: $4,055 per month.

Now test sensitivity. If half the delivery moves from North America to a higher-priced group, split the traffic and tier each geography separately. If the workload is a segment-heavy video service with 600 million requests instead of 100 million, the post-allowance North American request line rises from $90 to $590.

Example 3: 100 TB video delivery with Origin Shield

Assume 100,000 GB, 800 million HTTPS viewer requests, and 50 million billable US Origin Shield requests:

• Transfer: (9,000 × $0.085) + (40,000 × $0.080) + (50,000 × $0.060) = $6,965.
• Viewer requests: (800M − 10M) ÷ 10,000 × $0.01 = $790.
• Origin Shield: 50M ÷ 10,000 × $0.0075 = $37.50.
• Estimated CloudFront total: $7,792.50 per month before origin, logging, invalidation, and edge compute.

The Origin Shield line is small here, but its value depends on the origin work it removes. AWS's Origin Shield cost formula distinguishes dynamic requests from cacheable requests and accounts for cache hit ratio plus the share of requests arriving from a different regional cache. Model the billable Shield request count rather than applying the viewer-request total.

CDN cost comparison: what other providers charge for

A useful CDN cost comparison normalizes the bill, not just the bandwidth unit. Current public models vary enough that a single “cheapest per GB” table can mislead.

The source pages illustrate the difference. Cloudflare publishes website plan prices and separate add-ons. Fastly publishes bandwidth by region and requests per 10,000. Google Cloud CDN pricing separates cache delivery, lookup requests, and cache fill. Microsoft's current Azure CDN pricing notice says new classic instances ended in 2025 and retirement is scheduled for September 30, 2027, so a new comparison should use Azure Front Door rather than anchor on a retiring SKU. Akamai's public content-delivery page routes pricing conversations through sales.

Every model in that table shares one premise: region, request shape, plan allowance, or contract terms should determine what a delivered byte costs. It is worth asking why, because the premise is a commercial choice rather than a physical constraint. ZeroBuffer publishes one $0.0049/GB global delivery rate, falling to $0.0045 above 200 TB, with no contract, minimum, or regional surcharge — so a 100 TB month is $490 whether the audience is in Ohio, Lagos, Mumbai, or São Paulo, and the number does not move when a launch triples the traffic.

That is the comparison to run: not $0.0049 against CloudFront's cheapest scoped price, but the complete monthly total each model produces for your actual geography, request shape, and growth curve. CloudFront wins that test when a workload fits inside one distribution, stays inside a plan allowance, and draws real value from bundled WAF, DNS, and S3 credits. It gets expensive precisely where media traffic goes — multiple distributions, several continents, and spikes the allowance was not sized for.

For deeper vendor context, use the Fastly pricing guide, the top CDN providers comparison, and the Cloudflare alternatives guide. Keep S3 storage and exit charges in the separate AWS data transfer cost model so the same bytes are not counted twice.

How to calculate Amazon CDN cost accurately

The reliable method starts with a traffic export, not a vendor calculator. Build an expected, peak, and failure scenario, then reconcile one completed month before using the model for a migration decision.

1. Choose the buying model and scope

Record whether each distribution is pay-as-you-go, on a flat-rate plan, or covered by a Savings Bundle. For flat-rate, include the plan per distribution, configured Premium allowance if any, domains, and bundled services that replace another AWS charge. For pay-as-you-go, record the free allowance and contract discount separately so they are applied once.

2. Split delivery by billing geography

Export GB by the CloudFront billing-region codes rather than by origin Region or customer billing address. AWS's bill interpretation guide maps codes such as US, EU, IN, JP, AU, SA, and ME to delivery geographies.

Apply marginal transfer tiers within each group. Preserve enough precision to reconcile the invoice, then calculate a blended rate only at the end:

effective delivery rate = total viewer-delivery charge ÷ total delivered GB

3. Model requests by protocol and geography

Count HTTP and HTTPS requests separately after the shared allowance. Break out request-heavy paths such as HLS/DASH manifests and segments, image transformations, APIs, tracking pixels, and tiny static assets. Forecasting all requests from a large-file average can understate the count by orders of magnitude.

4. Add origin and optional-service meters

Create rows for Origin Shield, CloudFront Functions, Lambda@Edge, real-time logs, invalidations, field-level encryption, static IPs, and certificate choices when enabled. Add S3 reads, storage, Media Services, compute, transformations, and non-AWS origin egress outside the CloudFront subtotal.

Keep gross and net columns. Gross cost shows the architecture's unit economics; net cost applies the free tier, Savings Bundle credits, private pricing, promotional credits, and taxes. That separation prevents an expiring credit from looking like a permanent technical saving.

5. Reconcile with AWS reports

AWS documents a CloudFront billing report and a service usage report grouped by time, operation, Region, and usage type. The CloudFront billing-report guide recommends filtering Cost Explorer for CloudFront and downloading the usage breakdown as CSV.

For every material line, record:

Investigate gaps larger than your chosen tolerance. Common causes include binary billing units, credits applied in a different scope, traffic assigned to another geography, an enabled feature missing from the model, or origin charges living under another AWS service.

How to reduce Amazon CDN cost without breaking delivery

Cost optimization should preserve latency, availability, cache correctness, and deployment safety. Rank changes by measured dollars, then validate a full billing cycle.

Revisit the purchasing model first

Compare pay-as-you-go, an eligible flat-rate tier, and the Savings Bundle using the same distribution. Include bundled WAF, DNS, logs, compute, S3 credits, support, and operational constraints. A $200 plan that replaces several AWS line items can beat a transfer-only comparison; a one-year commitment can lose when traffic is declining or architecture is changing.

Improve cache efficiency

A higher cache hit ratio reduces origin requests and origin work, although it does not remove charges for bytes and requests delivered to viewers under pay-as-you-go. AWS's cache-hit-ratio guidance recommends longer practical cache lifetimes and limiting unnecessary query strings, cookies, and headers in the cache key.

Use immutable asset names for versioned files, keep authentication data out of cache keys when it does not change the response, and avoid fragmenting identical video segments by session identifiers. Measure cache hit rate and origin latency per behavior. CloudFront exposes cache hit rate as an optional distribution metric, according to its metrics documentation.

Reduce delivered bytes

Enable Brotli or gzip where useful, transform source images to AVIF or WebP, and remove oversized renditions from video bitrate ladders when device and playback evidence does not justify them. The savings are multiplicative: fewer bytes reduce viewer transfer, can reduce non-AWS origin egress on misses, and may move traffic into a lower plan or commitment range.

Do not optimize from source-file size. Range requests, manifests, retries, TLS overhead, abandoned video sessions, and multiple renditions make delivered bytes different from catalog size. Use CloudFront logs or trusted player analytics to quantify the actual response volume.

Control high-request workloads

Bundle tiny static assets where that does not hurt caching, lengthen sensible manifest lifetimes, and avoid unnecessary polling. Move lightweight request manipulation from Lambda@Edge to CloudFront Functions only when the function fits the smaller runtime and the change passes functional testing. Compare request savings with cache churn and deployment complexity.

Use invalidations deliberately

Versioned object names often remove the need to invalidate on every release. When an emergency purge is required, a wildcard can represent many files while counting as one path, but broad invalidation also ejects useful cache content. A cheaper invalidation line that causes a wave of origin misses is not necessarily a cheaper deployment.

Test geography changes before narrowing a Price Class

Price Class 100 includes the United States, Mexico, Canada, Europe, Israel, and Türkiye; broader classes add more locations. Excluding expensive regions can shift users to farther edges. Run latency, startup-time, rebuffering, and error-rate tests from the affected markets before treating the price difference as savings.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Amazon CDN cost per GB?

On CloudFront pay-as-you-go, the first 1 TB of monthly viewer data transfer is free. The next 9 TB costs $0.085/GB in the United States, Mexico, Canada, Europe, Israel, and Türkiye; first paid tiers are higher in other geographic groups. Transfer tiers, requests, features, discounts, and flat-rate eligibility determine the final effective rate.

Is Amazon CloudFront free?

CloudFront pay-as-you-go includes 1 TB of data transfer out and 10 million HTTP/HTTPS requests every month. AWS also offers a separate $0 flat-rate Free plan with 100 GB and 1 million requests plus a defined bundle of features. These are different offers with different allowances and behavior.

How do I calculate Amazon CDN cost?

Choose the buying model, split delivered GB and HTTP/HTTPS requests by billing geography, apply marginal tiers and allowances, then add Origin Shield, edge compute, logs, invalidations, certificates, static IPs, and origin-service costs. Reconcile the estimate against Cost Explorer and the CloudFront usage report before forecasting growth.

Does S3 to CloudFront data transfer cost money?

AWS does not charge data transfer for CloudFront origin fetches from an AWS origin such as S3. S3 storage, requests, retrieval, and other operations can still cost money, and CloudFront charges for delivery from the edge to viewers under pay-as-you-go.

Are CloudFront flat-rate plans really unlimited?

No. They have no overage charges, but AWS publishes monthly usage allowances and can respond to substantial sustained excess by serving traffic from fewer or more distant edge locations — so the cost stays fixed while delivery performance becomes the variable. Eligibility, plan features, one-plan-per-distribution scope, and the workload's request and transfer baseline all still apply.

What is the cheapest CDN for 100 TB per month?

Build a normalized bill per provider — geography, requests, cache behavior, origin cost, features, support, and contract terms — then compare net monthly cost, effective cost per delivered GB, performance, and migration risk. As a reference point for that model, 100 TB on ZeroBuffer's flat $0.0049/GB rate is a $490 delivery line with no regional split, plan allowance, or commitment behind it, which makes it a useful floor to measure scoped rate cards against.

Conclusion: compare the complete delivered-byte cost

Amazon CDN cost is no longer one regional rate card. CloudFront's pay-as-you-go tiers, flat-rate plans, and committed-spend discount can produce radically different totals for the same nominal bandwidth, and request shape or optional features can change the winner again.

Export one representative month, split it by geography and usage type, and model all three CloudFront buying paths. Then send the same traffic, request, cache, origin, and feature assumptions to every shortlisted CDN. The decision should come from a reconciled monthly total and a controlled performance test—not a headline per-GB price.

One question is worth asking before you build that spreadsheet: how much of the work exists only because the rate card is scoped by region, request type, distribution, and plan? A flat global rate collapses most of the model into one multiplication, and ZeroBuffer is free to start with no card, contract, or minimum, so you can put real traffic behind it and compare a measured invoice against your CloudFront forecast rather than two estimates.